So, here it was. The poison that, he suspected, killed the Johnsons in that Kent icehouse, and perhaps some of those dead Company captains as well. The slinking, underhand, covert material that was the true cause of their deaths. He poured the water from the jug into the bucket. He picked Abigail’s kitchen knife up out of the sink, and shoved it into his old leather belt. He picked up the bucket, carried it downstairs and into the street.
‘Tell the coroner not to drink any water,’ he told the constables outside. ‘And let me know when he arrives.’
He walked to the River Police Office, the poisoned water swilling in the bucket, some of it falling on the ground to merge with the shit and sewage and mud down there.
He poisoned Wapping as he went, and thought how poisoned Wapping had already become, to him.
By him.
He went up to Harriott, his clothes sticking to his skin. He had been in a frenzy of movement since sitting so still and so anxious in that long carriage ride from Kent. His head still endured agonies. Harriott and his office were quiet. The knife in his belt felt like a bar of cool ice.
The magistrate looked up at Horton from a letter he was reading, and indicated the chair on the other side of his desk.
‘Sit down, Charles.’
The mast of a ship moved past in the river outside, being towed by some small unseen pilot boat. Harriott never asked him to sit down. And he never called him Charles.
Horton carried the bucket of poison over to the chair: an appropriate cargo for one such as he, a husband whose wife was shivering in fear and dismay in a stranger’s bath, her life infected by the venomous stench of her husband’s work.
He could not sit down. The knife in his belt prevented it. Harriott saw him hesitate, saw his hand move to his side, made his assumptions.
‘Leave the knife here, Charles.’
Horton did not immediately move.
‘That is an order. Put the knife on my desk, and sit down.’
An old Naval strain in the old man’s voice. Horton obeyed. He had been a lieutenant before he was a mutineer. The knife clattered onto Harriott’s desk.
‘The investigation is over, Charles.’
Horton heard the words, but did not understand them.
‘Sir?’
‘This letter is from Sidmouth. The Home Secretary. He is demanding an immediate cessation into all investigations relating to the murders of the Johnsons.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘If he can be found, Elijah Putnam is to be arrested forthwith and to be charged with the deaths of the Johnsons and the murder of the servant girl, and you are to present whatever evidence you may have collected.’
‘What evidence is there against Putnam?’ The skinny ape, he thought, again.
‘The letter does not say.’
‘The man is to be made a scapegoat?’
‘It is no longer our concern. If I continue the investigation, I will be removed from office forthwith, and in any case I have been told my days here are numbered in months, not years.’
‘He must have moved quickly to send a message to Westminster from Kent.’
He, meaning Markland.
‘I have only just received this particular letter. Markland has turned out to be not quite the dandy we had previously taken him for. He has called for the investigation to be halted, and his call has been heeded.’
Horton’s rage pulsed in the veins in his skull, while his body sought only rest. He looked at the knife, and imagined Putnam or any of his anonymous, birdlike clerks in front of him, tied and bound and defenceless.
‘What did you discover in Seal?’ Harriott asked.
‘The Johnsons were not killed in their house. I do not believe they were even killed on the night before their discovery. I believe an icehouse was used to preserve their bodies for a period of time before they were returned to the Ratcliffe Highway. An icehouse in the grounds of Robert Burroughs’s country residence.’
‘Why?’
Why, why, why? Harriott’s old and ill mouth sounded the syllable, and it made Horton want to scream.
‘Benjamin Johnson discovered the existence of the assistant treasurers of St Helena,’ he said. ‘It may be that he discovered little else other than their inexplicable wealth. He must have told his wife, and she, as she had before, used the information to extract money from Sutton. This must have gone on for some time, and during that time Johnson was still digging away in the Archives. At some point, the Company became aware of his activities. Perhaps Sutton told them, or perhaps Johnson left himself exposed. Whatever the truth of it, the family was killed. They were taken to Seal, and they were poisoned by whatever substance is in that old icehouse. Then, they were returned to their home, to be found by Amy Beavis, who had been instructed to return at regular intervals. But she then endangered herself by removing letters from Mrs Johnson’s drawer, letters which must have been from Sutton. Whoever killed these people must have realised what had happened, and went to see Amy, and killed her.’
‘But why this elaboration? Why not simply kill the Johnsons in their own home? This trip to Seal and back – it seems preposterous.’
‘ To cause confusion. To mask the real killer. To make any accounts of movements impossible. To enable the real killer to be out of the country – even at sea – when the bodies were discovered.’
‘At sea?’
‘There is one man unaccounted for. Captain Edgar Burroughs. He is Alderman Robert Burroughs’s nephew. He left for St Helena a few days before the Johnsons were found dead.’
Which means he did not kill Amy Beavis, thought Horton. The skinny ape, again?
‘St Helena. That blasted place, again.’
‘Yes, sir. Edgar Burroughs is the new assistant treasurer. Every other assistant treasurer for the past thirty-five years has died, seemingly violently. All of them lived well – too well, one might say. Their residences seemed beyond the means of men of their station. And Alderman Burroughs’s house is stupendous, sir. I have not seen a house like it.’
‘A financial conspiracy?’
‘Embezzlement of the Company, perhaps. On a huge scale. Covered up by the office in which Putnam and Johnson worked. I do not know.’
‘And then – Sir Joseph.’
‘Yes. Sir Joseph.’
‘It would explain this conspiracy.’
‘That the Company has found the secret to immortal life on St Helena and is protecting it? Yes. That would explain the conspiracy. I have never heard such idiocy.’
‘Remember your place, Horton.’
‘My place is nowhere, sir. My place is beside my wife.’
Harriott sighed – a massive, frustrated noise – and picked up the letter.
‘The Home Secretary is ceasing our work, Horton. We cannot pursue this.’
Horton said nothing. The knife still sat on Harriott’s desk, full of possibility. Harriott turned his chair to face the bay window which looked out over the river.
‘This has been tried before, Charles,’ he said, and the recurrence of his first name brought Horton no comfort. ‘Five years ago, they tried to have me dismissed for financial malfeasance. A bunch of charges were brought against me, claiming that I had skimmed money from the Police Office accounts. None of it came to anything. But they tried. Oh my, they tried.’
Horton had not known of this. It surprised him, that such activities could remain hidden.
‘They gather, the rich men, Charles. They meet in corridors and whisper in their dining rooms, and they make their schemes, and with every snap of their fingers Justice is injured. They sicken me. This letter sickens me.’
It was awful, the change in Harriott. The transition from power to powerlessness. An old man receding into history before his constable’s eyes.
‘Markland is their man. I do not say he is corrupt. But he is a Proprietor of the Company, just like Burroughs. No doubt Sidmouth himself has a vote or two. The Company is enmeshed in the political and economic life
of this country like some essential infection. It was such a glorious enterprise once, Horton. We subjugated a great continent. But we were not fighting for England. We were fighting for profit. Men died. My own leg, destroyed. In the pursuit of financial gain. And now, again, this.’
The letter twitched in his hand.
‘This is how it will go now. Putnam will be arrested. He will be charged with every one of these murders. A willing judge – perhaps another Company Proprietor – will be found to lead a compliant jury, and the man who knows what really happened will hang. Or, possibly, that will be too big a risk. Putnam may say things they do not want heard. So perhaps another Putnam will be found, to sneak into his prison cell – they will put him in Coldbath Fields, the warders there are more than willing to turn a blind eye in return for a shilling or two – and this other Putnam will kill Putnam, and on and on it will go.’
Horton could feel it – the suffocating stench of influence. The unseen hand of secret conversations. Like poisoned air, invisible but filled with wicked power.
Money was power. That had been the essence of Harriott’s elegy, and over the coming days Horton saw the truth of it. Money was the power to get the impossible done, and to cover its tracks.
The urgency to leave was growing. Not just to seek the truth – though his mind buzzed with it, curiosity was not sufficient cause to expose his wife to the dangers of such a voyage. No. He needed to get them out of London. His only friends with any influence were now Sir Joseph Banks and Aaron Graham, and these two old men wanted him for only one thing: to discover St Helena’s secret. His old refuge, the rooms on Lower Gun Alley, was poisoned. Not with infected water, but with the spilled blood of a street boy.
Abigail listened as he described the situation, just as Harriott had outlined it the previous evening. How the schemes of the powerful were closing in around them. How the East India Company itself was embroiled in these murders, and how it seemed to him unlikely that Sidmouth, or anyone in power, would countenance damage to such a mighty arm of the State in the name of something as slippery as Justice.
He left out other, more prosaic matters and anxieties – Harriott’s age, illness and growing infirmity being the chief of these. But they had spoken of such matters before. The murky future was now the terrifying present. Wapping had been a refuge for both of them for so many years, but now the squeals of masts in the winds sounded like the ungreased hinges of prison doors.
Harriott’s prediction came to pass. Putnam was arrested, and interrogated first by the Shadwell magistrates, led by Edward Markland. Horton stopped visiting the Police Office, and followed the progress in the newspapers from a table at the Prospect of Whitby. He did not trust himself to be in the same room as Elijah Putnam.
After his initial interrogation at Shadwell, Putnam was taken to Coldbath Fields to await his full criminal trial at the Old Bailey. He should have been sent to Newgate, not Coldbath Fields. But it was just as Harriott had predicted. The warders at Coldbath Fields were notoriously open to bribes.
‘It is time to leave, I think,’ was all Abigail said when he suggested sailing to St Helena, and with that the decision was made.
There was no such thing as an immediate departure from London’s docks and wharves. A ship had to be found. A captain had to be willing. A berth had to be made available – doubly difficult, when one of the passengers was a woman.
But money was a great solvent for problems, and a ready source of money had presented itself. Harriott spoke with Sir Joseph Banks, and the Royal Society made the funds available – or were they perhaps Sir Joseph’s personal funds? Was this a private expedition, or an official one? Horton was considerably past caring about such matters.
Within a week a ship was found – a whaler, of all things, called the Martha. The coincidence of the name – shared with Emma Johnson’s bitter and ugly sister – was striking. Her captain was called Wallace, a small but wide American with a face like the barnacled hull of his ship. He told Horton that Sir Joseph Banks had himself negotiated the arrangement in his rooms in Soho Square.
‘He drove a bargain,’ Wallace told Horton. ‘No fool, that old man. But stopping at St Helena’s on the southward track is an expensive and irritating business, Horton. It’s costing Sir Joe a shilling or two.’
The Martha was at anchor in the Commercial Dock on the Surrey bank of the river. She was a Nantucket-built whaler seized by His Majesty’s Navy during the 1812 War, and acquired by a consortium of Liverpool merchants as a somewhat speculative investment – when she had been seized the barrels in her hold were full of whale oil, and this single cargo alone had made the investment worthwhile. Wallace had been her first mate when she was captured; her captain had refused to stay with the ship once she was seized, and was now back in Nantucket.
‘You are not any kind of a Patriot, then?’ asked Horton, and Wallace’s sea-swept face scowled at him.
‘There’s only one truth in this world, constable, and that’s money,’ he said. ‘The rest is just men seeking power over each other.’
The Martha looked to Horton like a typical Cowes-built whaler – barque-rigged, square-sterned – but he was no expert in such vessels. Four of her whaleboats hung from davits: two on the larboard side, one on the starboard, one at the stern. Two more whaleboats were suspended on either side of the cookhouse. The whaleboats – indeed, the entire ship – suggested a readiness to leave.
The captain showed her off in a workmanlike way – he was proud of his vessel, but showed none of the sentimental affection of a Naval commander.
‘A sailor, then, constable?’ asked Wallace as they inspected the ship.
‘Not for many a year, captain,’ Horton replied.
‘Royal Navy man? Perhaps like the bastards who stole my ship, eh?’
‘What tonnage of oil will you bring back in her, captain?’
Wallace smiled a tight little smile.
‘Perhaps 170 tons, constable. Around seventy whales.’
‘It sounds an extraordinary amount.’
‘’Tis average, constable. Unlike you.’
Wallace never mentioned Horton’s past again. He was being paid enough not to, Horton imagined.
A small cabin had been set aside for Horton and Abigail in the officers’ quarters at the stern of the ship, behind the mizzenmast. Between the mizzen and the main was steerage, where the ship boys and boat steerers were berthed. Then came the blubber room, as Wallace described it, the use of which Horton could only imagine. Then, before the foremast, was the forecastle, where the remainder of the crew would sleep. Beneath these areas was the hold which, for now, was filled with empty barrels.
‘You are not concerned at having a woman on board?’ Horton asked.
‘Is she a great beauty, constable?’ enquired Wallace, innocently. He showed Horton the lock he had had put on their cabin door. ‘Keep her inside as much as you can,’ he said. ‘The men will behave.’
Every day Horton expected to read of Putnam’s reaching an end of some kind inside Coldbath Fields, but then as the second week in June came around the Times ran a story.
NEW LONDON MONSTER ABSCONDS
COLDBATH FIELDS PRISON, CLERKENWELL: During the previous night, the clerk and suspected murderer ELIJAH PUTNAM made his escape from prison, only two days before his expected trial at the Old Bailey in the matter of the recent deaths on the RATCLIFFE HIGHWAY and in WHITECHAPEL. The means of Putnam’s escape are not known, but it is suspected that one of his warders was attacked in the night by an accomplice and while he lay senseless Putnam and his unknown helpmate made their way into the night. E. Markland, magistrate at the SHADWELL Public Office, vowed that Putnam would be pursued and recaptured.
Abigail also read the story – Horton was powerless to prevent her. She slept little the following nights, such that it was a blessed relief to both of them when the message came that they were to make their way to the Surrey docks for immediate departure on the Martha.
So it was that thre
e weeks after the terrible night in Lower Gun Alley, Horton and Abigail made their way over to the Commercial Dock. Horton’s old friend Peach rowed them across, his face as warm as the inside of Mr Burroughs’s icehouse. As they left the stairs by the Police Office, Horton looked up, and there, standing at his window looking over the river, he could spy the figure of John Harriott. He raised a hand, and the old figure in the window raised one in return. As they rowed across the river, the sun caught the glass of Harriott’s window in a blaze of fire, and the old man disappeared.
On the Surrey shore, they left Peach in his wherry, and turned to watch him make his way back over the river.
‘Farewell, Charon,’ said Abigail, and Horton did not ask her to explain the reference.
They made their way round the riverbank to the Commercial Dock, and from there onto the Martha. Horton avoided the eyes of the crewmen preparing the ship as he walked his wife on board, and then into the cabin. ‘So small, husband, so small!’ exclaimed Abigail, and despite his urgings she refused to remain inside, whatever the captain might have said.
‘This is my first voyage, husband. I will not spend it in a box.’
The Martha was ready for an immediate departure. Within two hours, they were being towed out of the Dock by a pilot. A pile of letters and newspapers was left by a bumboat, and Horton picked up a copy of the Times as Abigail stared out to the river as it glided past.
Putnam had still not been found. And Napoleon had just entered the United Netherlands.
INTERVAL: ABIGAIL AND THE WHALE
The dead whale’s empty eyes reflected the clambering limbs of the cabin boy who was being lifted up to the hole that had been cut in its head.
‘My God, no. It cannot be,’ said Abigail.
The hairy steward laughed.
‘Aye, it be true enough,’ he said. ‘Precious stuff left in there.’
The cabin boy was crying in terror, and some of the sailors shouted at him, shoving various blood-stained implements at his arse to force him upwards. There was blood and gore everywhere. The air stank of viscera.
The Detective and the Devil Page 17